He told me that if VC media player is installed, HP won’t replace the speakers as it damages the speakers. But, again there is a catch. What he said was “we see the state of the speaker, and if we do not find the damage we replace it.” He also said that “we understand that a lot of videos don’t work without VLC.”

Best way is to keep your default media player to Windows Media Player and use VLC as a last option.

One the payments which was reversed is back in my paypal account. I will watch for 2 days and tell you if they reversed it again.

Update 1: 4th Feb 2010 @ 20:32 IST: I got this reply from paypal

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

We are aware of this issue and I sincerely regret the inconvenience it
has caused you. We will inform you once the problem has been resolved.

I’ll be glad to hear from you if you need clarification. You can also
visit www.PayPal.com/101. Thank you for choosing PayPal for your online
payment needs. We appreciate your business.

Sincerely,
Cherryl
PayPal, an eBay Company

=====================================================
original Post starts from here

Here is the mail from paypal

We reversed this payment because we have stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India.

If this was a payment for a purchase of goods or services, and not a personal payment, then you may contact the buyer and have him or her resend the payment as follows: (a) click the Send Money tab, (b) select “Goods,” and (c) provide a shipping address.

If this payment was a personal payment such as a gift, then we have requested that the sender find another payment method until we restore personal payments to and from India.

We are trying to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we’re sorry for any inconvenience.

Thank you,
PayPal

I hope they resolve the issue fast.

It is strange, people on internet are reporting that they have this problem since 26 January, 2010. I managed to get payment to my bank in 2nd February 2010.

There is one more curious thing.

I have – 10$ negative in my account now.

It reads:

# PayPal balance: -$10.00 USD # Resolve your negative balance

when i clicked the resolve link I found this

Add Funds to Restore Your Balance

As stated in our User Agreement, you cannot have a negative balance and a sustained negative balance may result in limited account access. Please add funds to your account. You can mail a check, money order, or cashier’s check made payable to PayPal, Inc.
To add funds via credit card, complete the information below and click Submit.

From:
Amount:

To:
PayPal Account

You can also add funds by check deposit.

On the Policy updates tab, I found:

* Modification to the Personal Payment Fees for domestic Japanese transactions

The fees for personal payments received on or after October 14, 2009 for domestic Japanese transactions are being modified from:

3.4% + ¥40 JPY

to be the following:

3.6% + ¥40 JPY

All other fees shall remain the same.

May be similar policy will come in affect in India too.

But why the hell are they doing it without intimation?

Your Name XYZ
Email xyz@gmail.com
Message: Search Engine Optimization

Subject: We would like to get your website on first page of Google.

All of our processes use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized.
Please reply and I would be happy to send you a proposal.

Or

Sub: Search Engine Optimization

We are interested to get your website on first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing. Please get back to us for more details.

My normal response is “it is your decision. If you decide to go for it, I will forward all the username and passwords to you.”

Normally, the wordpress, the script used to build my clients websites have some powerful features for SEO. The basic SEo steps have been takn too like search engine submissions etc. Most of the clients have been given tips on how to get traffic to their sites.
But, in case you are willing to pay for additional SEO, you are free to do it.

He asked me for a solution that time. Frankly, even I was little perplexed on the way forward. The issue is that his content is fit for really serious folks and there is a limited way I could help him. Then something happened. I had asked all my clients for a “blog road map for 2010.” I had forwarded some blogging resources found in this site. So, he wrote back again stating that he needed to monetize. I too got out of my mental logjam and forwarded him some ad networks to register. The first one to approve him was Adbrite. Then the second one to approve him was chitika.

Frankly, I was skeptical about the combination. But, in the back of the mind, I thought, if Chitika + Adsense then, why not chitika + Adbrite ?

Frankly, the small Indian blogs could use this as an option if they have similar problem.

More Blogging Resources can be now found in Cub Blogger

The first impression was also good. I normally hate sites that do not display subject matter at home page. The sire had all the answers to the question like, which is the top ten and best in their categories. Next question was if they are rigged stats. So I checked sample pages like the dedicated server and the vps hosting.

Both the above categories were backed with customer testimonials. I like that cause it gives a fair picture. You could give out the biggest space, be highest bandwidth, but, if the customer is not happy, there is no point. I actually faced a situation like that. The web server company was asking for a charge if I wanted their support immediately. If I can wait for a day, then the support is free. Any way, I quit the 3rd day of the trial period. Well, I am not surprised that its not listed on the top ten web servers in this site.

If you are unhappy with the services of a host, you can definitely sign up on web hosting geeks website and type out your point of view on the host. At the same time, if you like a host, you can definitely type that in. Such resources can help fellow netizens.

I took time to go through webmasters resources and blog of web hosting geeks. They had very informative articles. Although, as a seasoned webmaster, you know most of the content posted there, there is still a scope to learn. As for beginners, it gives a lot of knowledge which can help purchase. Even if you plan to purchase web hosting from a reseller, you could still look into it to figure out alternatives or the soundness.

Confirming that the people who ask for your information have actually requested to be on your list is the number one step in the battle for deliverability. You should be using a process called confirmed opt-in or verified opt-in to send a unique link to the attempted subscriber when they request information. Before adding the person to your list they must click that unique link verifying that they are indeed the same person that owns the email address and requested to subscribe.

Subscriber Addresses

When requesting website visitors to opt-in ask for their “real” or “primary” email address instead of a free email address like Yahoo or Hotmail. Free emails tend to be throw away accounts and typically have a shorter lifetime than a primary ISP address.

List Maintenance

Always promptly remove undeliverable addresses that bounce when sending email to them. An address that bounces with a permanent error 2-3 times in a 30 day period should be removed from the list. ISP’s track what percentage of your newsletters bounce and will block them if you attempt to continually deliver messages to closed subscriber mailboxes.
Message Format

Usage of HTML messages to allow for text formatting, multiple columns, images, and brand recognition is growing in popularity and is widely supported by most email client software. Most spam is also HTML formatted and thus differentiating between requested email and spam HTML messages can be difficult. A 2004 study by AWeber .com shows that plain text messages are undeliverable 1.15% of the time and HTML only messages were undeliverable 2.3%. If sending HTML it is important to always send a plain text alternative message, also called text/HTML multi-part mime format.

Content

Many ISP’s filter based on the content that appears within the message text.

Website URL:

Research potential newsletter advertisers before allowing them to place ads in your newsletter issues. If they have used their website URL to send spam, just having their URL appear in your newsletter could cause the entire message to be filtered.

Words/phrases:

Choose your language carefully when crafting messages. Avoid hot button topics often found in spam such as medication, mortgages, making money, and pornography. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spelling, you’ll just make your messages appear more spam like.

Images:

Avoid creating messages that are entirely images. Use images sparingly, if at all. Commonly used open rate tracking technology uses images to calculate opens. You may choose to disable open rate tracking to avoid being filtered based on image content.

Attachments:

With viruses running rampant and spreading thru the usage of malicious email attachments many users are wary of attached documents. It’s often better to link to files via a website URL to reduce recipient fear of attachments and reduce the overall message size.

CAN-SPAM Compliance

The January 2004 Federal CAN-SPAM law introduced a number of rules regarding the delivery of email. It’s important you have your legal counsel review your practices and ensure you are in compliance. The two most important rules include having a valid postal mail address listed in all commercial messages and a working unsubscribe link that is promptly honored to remove the subscriber from future messages.
Reputation

Reputation services are often used by large ISP’s as a way to vet email senders regarding their email practices and policies. Businesses listed with these services are then given less stringent filtering or no filtering at all. Several reputation services are:

* http://www.isipp.com/iadb.php
* http://www.bondedsender.com
* http://www.habeas.com

Relationships & Whitelisting

Contact with major ISP’s and email providers is essential in letting them know about your requested subscriber email. Many large providers such as AOL and Yahoo have specific whitelisting programs and postmaster website areas to ensure your email is delivered as long as you meet their policies and procedures in handling your opt-in list.

Email deliverability is about ensuring requested opt-in email is delivered to the intended recipient. While no single tip will enable you to get 100% of your email delivered each one utilized as a group can go a long way to reaching that goal.

(Tom Kulzer is AWeber CEO)

Let me put that in perspective. This is cheating. If piracy is bad, then non-piracy is even worse.

Ok, since you understood whats gong in my head, you wouldn’t expect me trusting Miscrosoft any more. Now, MS OS is a very costly software and its not easy to dump it. What options do I have?

It could be ok to forgive MS and go for Windows 7. Do I have an option?

Well not now, but, our pals from Google have announced Google Chrome OS. It is expected to be launched in second half of 2010. MS Vista support is not going to die till then. Till then I can afford to hold on to the Vista straw.

The other option is Ubuntu. I might decide on it when Google Chrome OS.

For Microsoft, I plan to forgive and not forget. I am going to keep an open mimd and check its products, but, I doubt i will ever buy them.

Improvement is a part of process. You cannot have a perfect website in one go. For example, you have created one of the best ever home page design, but, people mostly check out only your products page. It is then worth focusing on the product page improvement than the home page.

Good clients pay web companies to do just that. This investment helps clients to get a better return. It is important for an e-commerce website to promote best selling items page. For a news website, its important that people keep coming in by understanding the readers preference.

It is a good practice to treat your website as an investment and get returns on it. Returns could be in the form of direct sales, cost avoidance ( for example reduce load on your call center), attracting better supplier, employee hiring etc.

Calculating the ROI is the beginning and not the final goal. Once you have the statistics, you can look forward to better website ROI and its a continuous process.

As per the OZ govt website:

The Australian Broadband Guarantee is a targeted Government program aimed at providing universal access to a metro-comparable level of broadband service across Australia. The Australian Broadband Guarantee will ensure that the broadband access rights that regional and rural Australians have enjoyed under the Government’s HiBIS and Broadband Connect programs are maintained, and extended into all metropolitan areas.

Internet Service Providers such as Neighbourhood Cable have registered with the Department of Communications, Information, Technology and the Arts (DCITA) to receive an incentive payment for anyone connected under the Australian Broadband Guarantee program to Ballarat Premium Wireless. These incentive payments are used to reduce the installation price of broadband services and to offer incentives to ISP providers to roll out further broadband infrastructure to people living in regional, rural and remote areas of Australia.

Hope India too comes out with policies like this.

Direct Consulting Group’s internet consultants have worked with many companies and organizations North America wide. They also have a testimony by Jim Jordan, a Motivational Speaker from North America.

Internet Marketing revolves around web linking and search engine optimization. Like rest of the business processes, Internet Marketing requires specialization to be effective. Direct Consulting Group’s search engine optimization marketing mentions that they help in Optimization Services for Google, Yahoo & BING. These 3 are the most used web search sites in the world. The Link Building page writes that they help build “one way links.” One way links are a very useful tool to get a website the recognition from Search Engines. The more the relevant websites give a link to your website, the better chance it stands to to have a high ranking on search engines.

Direct Consulting Group also offers a free website evaluation if there is a need to get an opinion on particular website’s Search Engine Optimization capabilities. This could be a good way to get started.

The pricing which is the key is dependent upon the number of pages in the target, online competition for the keywords and marketing budget.